IBM's Watson AI now available on any cloud: 3 notes

"Most large organizations have data and workloads spread across multiple public and private clouds, SaaS and on-premises environments - sometimes as a result of their business process infrastructure, but also for compliance, regulatory and data privacy reasons", said Denis Kennelly, general manager of cloud integration at IBM.

IBM also launched new hybrid cloud tools and services to help enterprises navigate the complexities around cloud.

Additionally, ICBC Argentina has announced a five-year, United States $63 million agreement with IBM Services, "focused on redefining the bank's customer experience with IBM Watson and IBM Cloud", Big Blue said, adding that 19 out of the top 20 Fortune 500 banks and financial institutions use IBM Cloud. Businesses will be able to infuse AI into their apps, regardless of where they reside.

The flexibility this affords can remove one of the major obstacles to scaling AI, since businesses can now leave data in secure or preferred environments and take Watson to that data. Furthermore, a recent Gartner study found that 'data and analytics continue to struggle with the complexity, time to integration and cost implications of their data integration projects, thereby inflating their schedules and delivery costs with multiple cycles of revised project scope'. WML Accelerator is created to help enterprises train and deploy ML models built in IBM Watson Studio and monitored with Watson OpenScale.

Qatar Development Bank has collaborated with IBM to establish the IBM Innovation Hub Doha.

"In doing so, they will draw on their shared leadership in key technologies, such as Linux, containers, Kubernetes, multi-cloud management, and cloud management and automation".

Hyundai Card Commercial announced that they are working with IBM to advance their use of cloud-based AI and blockchain technology with the aim to improve consumer experience and expand their financial services business globally. "The automated model and library selection capabilities of SnapML greatly reduce the time required to parse through all of these tools, allowing users to begin ML training much more quickly".

At the heart of today's announcements is a series of new Watson microservices built for ICP for Data that are based on open source technologies and easily scalable across cloud environments. Whereas, services like Watson Studio for building AI, Watson Assistant, and AI OpenScale were previously only available through IBM's public cloud.

In order to break AI siloes for enterprises that are caused by vendor lock-in, IBM is making its AI engine IBM Watson portable across any cloud. In addition, the Watson Assistant Discovery Extension enables organisations to unlock hidden insights in unstructured data and documents.